Publications

Benchmarking Bayesian Causal Discovery Methods for Downstream Treatment Effect Estimation
Chris Emezue
Alexandre Drouin
Tristan Deleu
Stefan Bauer
Yoshua Bengio
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
CATS: A Computation-Aware Transaction Processing System with Proactive Unlocking
Bolun Zhu
Yu Hua
Ziyin Long
Xue (Steve) Liu
With the increasing complexity of network applications and high demands for QoS, transaction processing systems have received more attention… (see more)s due to salient features of simplicity and atomicity. Computation operations play an important role in transaction processing systems. However, conventional QoS-based mechanisms become inefficient due to the limited concurrent support upon computation operations, thus causing high time consumption in the critical path of concurrency control. In order to efficiently offer concurrent computations, we propose CATS, a Computation Aware Transaction processing System, to mitigate performance impacts caused by computation operations. CATS further leverages program semantics to defer the execution of transaction operations in the commit phase to alleviate unnecessary conflicts caused by computations. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate that CATS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art designs, including 2PL and OCC based transaction processing systems on high-contended and computation-intensive workloads. We have released the open-source codes in GitHub for public use.
2023-06-19
International Workshop on Quality of Service (published)
doi.org
CATS: A Computation-Aware Transaction Processing System with Proactive Unlocking
Bolun Zhu
Yu Hua
Ziyin Long
Xue (Steve) Liu
With the increasing complexity of network applications and high demands for QoS, transaction processing systems have received more attention… (see more)s due to salient features of simplicity and atomicity. Computation operations play an important role in transaction processing systems. However, conventional QoS-based mechanisms become inefficient due to the limited concurrent support upon computation operations, thus causing high time consumption in the critical path of concurrency control. In order to efficiently offer concurrent computations, we propose CATS, a Computation Aware Transaction processing System, to mitigate performance impacts caused by computation operations. CATS further leverages program semantics to defer the execution of transaction operations in the commit phase to alleviate unnecessary conflicts caused by computations. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate that CATS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art designs, including 2PL and OCC based transaction processing systems on high-contended and computation-intensive workloads. We have released the open-source codes in GitHub for public use.
2023-06-19
2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS) (published)
doi.org
Causal Discovery with Language Models as Imperfect Experts
Stephanie Long
Alexandre Piché
Valentina Zantedeschi
Tibor Schuster
Alexandre Drouin
Understanding the causal relationships that underlie a system is a fundamental prerequisite to accurate decision-making. In this work, we ex… (see more)plore how expert knowledge can be used to improve the data-driven identification of causal graphs, beyond Markov equivalence classes. In doing so, we consider a setting where we can query an expert about the orientation of causal relationships between variables, but where the expert may provide erroneous information. We propose strategies for amending such expert knowledge based on consistency properties, e.g., acyclicity and conditional independencies in the equivalence class. We then report a case study, on real data, where a large language model is used as an imperfect expert.
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Development of a hydrated electron dosimeter for radiotherapy applications: A proof of concept.
Julien Mégrourèche
H. Bekerat
Jingyi Bian
Alaina Bui
Jack C Sankey
Lilian Childress
Shirin A. Enger
BACKGROUND Hydrated electrons, which are short-lived products of radiolysis in water, increase the optical absorption of water, providing a … (see more)pathway toward near-tissue-equivalent clinical radiation dosimeters. This has been demonstrated in high-dose-per-pulse radiochemistry research, but, owing to the weak absorption signal, its application in existing low-dose-per-pulse radiotherapy provided by clinical linear accelerators (linacs) has yet to be investigated. PURPOSE The aims of this study were to measure the optical absorption associated with hydrated electrons produced by clinical linacs and to assess the suitability of the technique for radiotherapy (⩽ 1 cGy per pulse) applications. METHODS 40 mW of 660-nm laser light was sent five passes through deionized water contained in a 10 × 4 ×
2023-06-19
Medical Physics (published)
doi.org
An Empirical Study of the Effectiveness of Using a Replay Buffer on Mode Discovery in GFlowNets
Nikhil Murali Vemgal
Elaine Lau
Doina Precup
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn an optimal policy by iteratively sampling actions to learn how to maximize the total exp… (see more)ected return,
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Exploring Exchangeable Dataset Amortization for Bayesian Posterior Inference
Sarthak Mittal
Niels Leif Bracher
Guillaume Lajoie
Priyank Jaini
Marcus A Brubaker
Bayesian inference provides a natural way of incorporating uncertainties and different underlying theories when making predictions or analyz… (see more)ing complex systems. However, it requires computationally expensive routines for approximation, which have to be re-run when new data is observed and are thus infeasible to efficiently scale and reuse. In this work, we look at the problem from the perspective of amortized inference to obtain posterior parameter distributions for known probabilistic models. We propose a neural network-based approach that can handle exchangeable observations and amortize over datasets to convert the problem of Bayesian posterior inference into a single forward pass of a network. Our empirical analyses explore various design choices for amortized inference by comparing: (a) our proposed variational objective with forward KL minimization, (b) permutation-invariant architectures like Transformers and DeepSets, and (c) parameterizations of posterior families like diagonal Gaussian and Normalizing Flows. Through our experiments, we successfully apply amortization techniques to estimate the posterior distributions for different domains solely through inference.
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
GFlowNets for Causal Discovery: an Overview
Dragos Cristian Manta
Edward J Hu
Yoshua Bengio
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Green Federated Learning
Ashkan Yousefpour
Shen Guo
Ashish Shenoy
Sayan Ghosh
Pierre Stock
Kiwan Maeng
Schalk-Willem Kruger
Michael Rabbat
Carole-Jean Wu
Ilya Mironov
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/FL (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Identifiability of Discretized Latent Coordinate Systems via Density Landmarks Detection
Vitória Barin-Pacela
Kartik Ahuja
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Pascal Vincent
Disentanglement aims to recover meaningful latent ground-truth factors from only the observed distribution. Identifiability provides the the… (see more)oretical grounding for disentanglement to be well-founded. Unfortunately, unsupervised identifiability of independent latent factors is a theoretically proven impossibility in the i.i.d. setting under a general nonlinear smooth map from factors to observations. In this work, we show that, remarkably, it is possible to recover discretized latent coordinates under a highly generic nonlinear smooth mapping (a diffeomorphism) without any additional inductive bias on the mapping. This is, assuming that latent density has axis-aligned discontinuity landmarks, but without making the unrealistic assumption of statistical independence of the factors. We introduce this novel form of identifiability, termed quantized coordinate identifiability , and provide a comprehensive proof of the recovery of discretized coordinates.
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Identifiability of Discretized Latent Coordinate Systems via Density Landmarks Detection
Vitória Barin-Pacela
Kartik Ahuja
Simon Lacoste-Julien
Pascal Vincent
2023-06-19
ICML.cc/2023/Workshop/SPIGM (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
A Kernel Perspective on Behavioural Metrics for Markov Decision Processes
Pablo Samuel Castro
Tyler Kastner
Prakash Panangaden
Mark Rowland
We present a novel perspective on behavioural metrics for Markov decision processes via the use of positive definite kernels. We define a ne… (see more)w metric under this lens that is provably equivalent to the recently introduced MICo distance (Castro et al., 2021). The kernel perspective enables us to provide new theoretical results, including value-function bounds and low-distortion finite-dimensional Euclidean embeddings, which are crucial when using behavioural metrics for reinforcement learning representations. We complement our theory with strong empirical results that demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in practice.
2023-06-19
TMLR (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net